9 ms·

The switch to Linux or other free operating systems is long overdue. If your excuse is hardware support, then (1) your hardware is probably supported these days

The switch to Linux or other free operating systems is long overdue. If your excuse is hardware support, then (1) your hardware is probably supported these days and (2) you should not buy hardware that is incompatible with the operating system you plan to use. If your excuse is editing MS Office files, LibreOffice supports the formats and works great, and MS Office on Wine is an option. If your excuse is games, then know that with Steam and Wine combined your potential gaming library is HUGE. If your excuse is laziness or resistance to change, then I thank you for being honest, and urge you to overcome it. Proprietary operating systems work against your interests. Stop using them.

sathackr 9y ago
Been on Ubuntu for a bit over a year now. Steam works great, and LibreOffice has been good enough to get the job done. I run Google Earth Pro and Sketchup in Wine, even World of Warcraft runs quite well in Wine. I had a ton of issues with Wine until I found PlayOnLinux. Things still don't quite 'just work' -- but I've been able to use way more than I could before I found it. KSP and WoW are my two big games, and they both work fine.
- dvtv75 9y ago
  I had never heard of PlayOnLinux until now. Installed - thanks for the tip! KSP and Rimworld are my two big games, at least KSP will be again when I get a replacement video card.
  - sathackr 9y ago
    Np. I messed around for a bit till I found it also. I'm surprised it didn't pop up on my radar previously. It's really helped me a ton with getting things working under Ubuntu. I haven't played Rimworld yet. Might have to go check it out. I've found TerraTech recently but I've had about as much fun as I can have with it until they fix some more things.
  - AimHere 9y ago
    You're in luck - you don't even need wine for either of those games since they're Linux-native.
- hvidgaard 9y ago
  Ironically, WoW on linux through wine runs better and with a significantly better latency compared to Windows.
eropple 9y ago
> your hardware is probably supported these days True. Support has gotten significantly better. It's not perfect, and the failure cases are much worse than Windows (and somewhat worse than OS X), but it's gotten better. > you should not buy hardware that is incompatible with the operating system you plan to use This is where you start going off the rails. People did buy hardware that was compatible with the operating system they do use. It is super presumptuous and weird to try this sleight-of-hand in your argument. > LibreOffice supports the formats and works great You are now off the rails and airborne. Nontrivial Excel spreadsheets break in LibreOffice Calc on the regular and it's significantly slower (!) than Excel besides; anything using VBA, which is still a pretty big chunk of serious Office users especially in enterprises, is a nonstarter for obvious reasons. The UI is also, IMO, a huge step backwards from Office and now that the Ribbon "but but it's different" is far enough in the past that pretty much everybody has switched, another UI switch is probably not worth it. > with Steam and Wine combined your potential gaming library is HUGE Sailing through the air with the mountain approaching. Your potential gaming library is huge--and either indie (which is fine, but limited) or largely broken. Suggesting WINE to somebody who doesn't already know what they're in for is dirty; even gold-flagged games in WINE that aren't a decade old are often broken in ways your average mortal can't fix. If you enjoy being elbow-deep in a computer, this may be fine for you. Most people aren't. Your preaching ignores this. It shouldn't. > Proprietary operating systems work against your interests. Stop using them. You've hit the cliffside. There are no survivors. People will stop using them when open-source ones are good at the things they want. Right now, they're still not, and exhorting people to use an inferior good (for the things they care about) is kinda just doing people dirty. Don't get me wrong: I would like Linux and other open-source operating systems to be better desktop OSes for normal people (and some of my own projects are intended to help facilitate that) but still, in 2017, it is a raw effing deal for the majority of people to switch to it. This should change. I know you work on stuff to make that happen, and that's awesome. But it's still not something I think can be recommended in good conscience to most folks, even around here. It barely works for me, and I've been using it on the desktop for fifteen years and have grown accustomed to the need to cultivate tragically low expectations around the whole stack.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  >This is where you start going off the rails. People did buy hardware that was compatible with the operating system they do use. It is super presumptuous and weird to try this sleight-of-hand in your argument. Make new purchases more intelligently. >You are now off the rails and airborne. Excel is still largely unsupported and breaks nontrivial spreadsheets. The UI is also, IMO, a huge step backwards from Office and now that the Ribbon "but but it's different" is far enough in the past that pretty much everybody has switched, another UI switch is probably not worth it. Which is why I mentioned MS Office in Wine. >Still sailing through the air with the mountain approaching. Your potential gaming library is huge--and either indie or largely broken. Suggesting WINE to somebody who doesn't already know what they're in for is dirty; even gold-flagged games in WINE don't work particularly well a whole lot. I suggested it to the HN crowd, who I expect to have a higher bar of troubleshooting capability. >People will stop using them when open-source ones are good at the things they want. Right now, they're still not, and exhorting people to use an inferior good (for the things they care about) is kinda just doing people dirty. You and people like you are the reason that it's not as good as it could be. I use Linux as my daily driver and it works extremely well. But if you continue to let it languish with a small market share because you can't be bothered to troubleshoot it for 10 minutes or maybe live without that piece of software you need so much, then it won't even go anywhere. Yours is a self defeating attitude.
dingo_bat 9y ago
> If your excuse is editing MS Office files, LibreOffice supports the formats and works For very small values of "works". I've found that even high school projects turn out to be a bit too much for libre office.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Well, my definition of "works" is that you can read it. Authoring new documents should use ODF. And again, MS Office works on Wine, so you can use that in the worst case.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    I have used Linux (Mint) for all my work in college for ~6 months. In my experience, using Word online on Chromium was better than using libre Office locally. Both features and UI wise. Both for reading existing stuffs and for making new docs. I have nothing agains Libre Office but suggesting it can be used as a replacement for MS Office in any capacity is disingenious. Regarding wine, no need for that now that Office online and Google docs exists.
    - davidgerard 9y ago
      > Regarding wine, no need for that now that Office online and Google docs exists. This is evidence you've never used Google Docs for real work and have never encountered its absolutely dismal docx rendering. I get stuff in Gmail regularly I then have to open in LibreOffice to bloody read.
  - skrebbel 9y ago
    You're really undermining your own argument here, even though you started out very well. If I send an ODF to my lawyer, investor or accountant they're going to panic.
    - dijit 9y ago
      That's disingenuous. Word has supported odt and odf for both read and write, for nearly a decade already. (2008 version supported it from preliminary checking)
hobarrera 9y ago
Even if your excuse is needing MSO, I've heard that WPS Office (http://wps-community.org/download.html http://wps-community.org/download.html) works really really well for people migrating, even in cases where LO was insufficient.
int_19h 9y ago
You're making the same exact argument that people trying to push Linux on the desktop were making 10 years ago, and 15 years (and probably before that, it's just that's when I started dabbling in that stuff). It boils down to "it works for me, and if it doesn't work for you because of X, Y and Z, then you should just stop doing that". You can judge for yourself just how persuasive this argument really is by looking at desktop Linux market share over the past 20 years.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  The argument is the same, but Linux desktops did get a lot better, and with better support, since then. There's now multiple distros with great UX to choose from (as opposed to "learn xfree86 and stop whining") and indeed Wine works great with lots of programs. I say this as an avid Windows 10 user. IMHO there's still a usability gap (which is why I'm on Windows), but it's narrowing. GP's argument has a lot more merit now than it did 15 years ago.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Driver support is only part of the problem (but still a problem). The absence of self discoverability / the RTFM approach of linux will always create a ceiling in term of adoption outside of professional developers. Except when you stick a consumer GUI and specialised hardware on top (android/chromeOS). But these are not general desktops on which people can work.
  - kristofferR 9y ago
    Desktop Linux suffers from the same chicken-and-egg problem that doomed Windows Phone. Developers don't develop for it since the user base isn't large enough, and people don't switch to it because app support is severely lacking. How good the raw OS is doesn't matter that much when the apps aren't up to par. Your Wine comment illustrates my point - while Wine is an awesome project - even apps running perfectly through it feel like they're running on Windows 2000. That's fine if you just care about the functionality of the app, but not if you care about the user experience.
  - int_19h 9y ago
sjellis 9y ago
A lot of people who use a computer for work purposes have a number of software applications that they must be able to run reliably in order to do their job. The problem is steadily getting better in some areas, but there are still thousands of specialist applications in service today that only run on Windows. If you are lucky, there may also be Mac versions. The reality is that it's often not feasible to only run FOSS, and nothing but FOSS.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  Wine has been up to real-world commercial use for at least a decade, in my experience. It's more surprising these days when stuff doesn't work in Wine than when it does. (.NET support is still annoyingly imperfect.) Sponsoring getting a vertical market app working 100% in Wine is unlikely to be cheaper than cleaning up after WannaCry's competently-written successors.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    > unlikely to be cheaper I meant, of course, unlikely to be more expensive. Gah!
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  So run it at work and FOSS at home. Let the situation improve over time. I'm not talking to the everyman, I'm talking to the Hacker News reader.
cm2187 9y ago
LibreOffice is fine for basic features. But in a corporate environment you often have lots of addins to interoperate with lots of systems which won't play well with LibreOffice
jvdl 9y ago
But your argument basically boils down to: Stop using the operating system where everything works: apps, games, hardware, good office package, etc.; rather use an operating system on which debugging to a layman translates to a plane of hell itself, where your hardware may or may not work, and half your game library certainly won't. I would happily switch to Linux permanently the day the flagship office package UI doesn't resemble Office 97 (the ribbon UI is absolutely fantastic in MS Office), I can get all of my games to work, and I don't need to recompile a kernel to get something as basic as a graphics driver running.
- jhasse 9y ago
  > the flagship office package UI doesn't resemble Office 97 (the ribbon UI is absolutely fantastic in MS Office) It's being worked on: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/how-to-enable-libreoffice-ribbon-notebook-bar http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/how-to-enable-libreoffice... > I can get all of my games to work Many games don't port to Linux until all users have switched. It's a chicken-egg problem :( > I don't need to recompile a kernel to get something as basic as a graphics driver running. You already don't need to do that. Intel and AMD's open-source drivers are included in the kernel and nVidia's driver can be installed without recompiling the kernel.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    The games are getting better. Just over half of my steam library works at the moment. Not sure when it happened but over the last 2 years I noticed more and more things being available. It's no longer just low quality indie stuff.
    - jhasse 9y ago
      If any Blizzard game would be ported, that would truly be a milestone (StarCraft 2 with WINE is a lot slower on my machine). Also many games require nVidia drivers or AMD's open source driver (e.g. Life is strange). I'm using a 144 Hz monitor and therefore need touse AMDGPU Pro (AMDGPU has a bug with >120 Hz: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93826 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93826 ). But you're right: It's getting better :) For example Rocket League and Dota 2 work great.

sathackr 9y ago

Been on Ubuntu for a bit over a year now. Steam works great, and LibreOffice has been good enough to get the job done. I run Google Earth Pro and Sketchup in Wine, even World of Warcraft runs quite well in Wine. I had a ton of issues with Wine until I found PlayOnLinux. Things still don't quite 'just work' -- but I've been able to use way more than I could before I found it. KSP and WoW are my two big games, and they both work fine.

dvtv75 9y ago
I had never heard of PlayOnLinux until now. Installed - thanks for the tip! KSP and Rimworld are my two big games, at least KSP will be again when I get a replacement video card.
- sathackr 9y ago
  Np. I messed around for a bit till I found it also. I'm surprised it didn't pop up on my radar previously. It's really helped me a ton with getting things working under Ubuntu. I haven't played Rimworld yet. Might have to go check it out. I've found TerraTech recently but I've had about as much fun as I can have with it until they fix some more things.
- AimHere 9y ago
  You're in luck - you don't even need wine for either of those games since they're Linux-native.
hvidgaard 9y ago
Ironically, WoW on linux through wine runs better and with a significantly better latency compared to Windows.

eropple 9y ago

> your hardware is probably supported these days True. Support has gotten significantly better. It's not perfect, and the failure cases are much worse than Windows (and somewhat worse than OS X), but it's gotten better. > you should not buy hardware that is incompatible with the operating system you plan to use This is where you start going off the rails. People did buy hardware that was compatible with the operating system they do use. It is super presumptuous and weird to try this sleight-of-hand in your argument. > LibreOffice supports the formats and works great You are now off the rails and airborne. Nontrivial Excel spreadsheets break in LibreOffice Calc on the regular and it's significantly slower (!) than Excel besides; anything using VBA, which is still a pretty big chunk of serious Office users especially in enterprises, is a nonstarter for obvious reasons. The UI is also, IMO, a huge step backwards from Office and now that the Ribbon "but but it's different" is far enough in the past that pretty much everybody has switched, another UI switch is probably not worth it. > with Steam and Wine combined your potential gaming library is HUGE Sailing through the air with the mountain approaching. Your potential gaming library is huge--and either indie (which is fine, but limited) or largely broken. Suggesting WINE to somebody who doesn't already know what they're in for is dirty; even gold-flagged games in WINE that aren't a decade old are often broken in ways your average mortal can't fix. If you enjoy being elbow-deep in a computer, this may be fine for you. Most people aren't. Your preaching ignores this. It shouldn't. > Proprietary operating systems work against your interests. Stop using them. You've hit the cliffside. There are no survivors. People will stop using them when open-source ones are good at the things they want. Right now, they're still not, and exhorting people to use an inferior good (for the things they care about) is kinda just doing people dirty. Don't get me wrong: I would like Linux and other open-source operating systems to be better desktop OSes for normal people (and some of my own projects are intended to help facilitate that) but still, in 2017, it is a raw effing deal for the majority of people to switch to it. This should change. I know you work on stuff to make that happen, and that's awesome. But it's still not something I think can be recommended in good conscience to most folks, even around here. It barely works for me, and I've been using it on the desktop for fifteen years and have grown accustomed to the need to cultivate tragically low expectations around the whole stack.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
>This is where you start going off the rails. People did buy hardware that was compatible with the operating system they do use. It is super presumptuous and weird to try this sleight-of-hand in your argument. Make new purchases more intelligently. >You are now off the rails and airborne. Excel is still largely unsupported and breaks nontrivial spreadsheets. The UI is also, IMO, a huge step backwards from Office and now that the Ribbon "but but it's different" is far enough in the past that pretty much everybody has switched, another UI switch is probably not worth it. Which is why I mentioned MS Office in Wine. >Still sailing through the air with the mountain approaching. Your potential gaming library is huge--and either indie or largely broken. Suggesting WINE to somebody who doesn't already know what they're in for is dirty; even gold-flagged games in WINE don't work particularly well a whole lot. I suggested it to the HN crowd, who I expect to have a higher bar of troubleshooting capability. >People will stop using them when open-source ones are good at the things they want. Right now, they're still not, and exhorting people to use an inferior good (for the things they care about) is kinda just doing people dirty. You and people like you are the reason that it's not as good as it could be. I use Linux as my daily driver and it works extremely well. But if you continue to let it languish with a small market share because you can't be bothered to troubleshoot it for 10 minutes or maybe live without that piece of software you need so much, then it won't even go anywhere. Yours is a self defeating attitude.

dingo_bat 9y ago

> If your excuse is editing MS Office files, LibreOffice supports the formats and works For very small values of "works". I've found that even high school projects turn out to be a bit too much for libre office.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Well, my definition of "works" is that you can read it. Authoring new documents should use ODF. And again, MS Office works on Wine, so you can use that in the worst case.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  I have used Linux (Mint) for all my work in college for ~6 months. In my experience, using Word online on Chromium was better than using libre Office locally. Both features and UI wise. Both for reading existing stuffs and for making new docs. I have nothing agains Libre Office but suggesting it can be used as a replacement for MS Office in any capacity is disingenious. Regarding wine, no need for that now that Office online and Google docs exists.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    > Regarding wine, no need for that now that Office online and Google docs exists. This is evidence you've never used Google Docs for real work and have never encountered its absolutely dismal docx rendering. I get stuff in Gmail regularly I then have to open in LibreOffice to bloody read.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  You're really undermining your own argument here, even though you started out very well. If I send an ODF to my lawyer, investor or accountant they're going to panic.
  - dijit 9y ago
    That's disingenuous. Word has supported odt and odf for both read and write, for nearly a decade already. (2008 version supported it from preliminary checking)

hobarrera 9y ago

Even if your excuse is needing MSO, I've heard that WPS Office (http://wps-community.org/download.html http://wps-community.org/download.html) works really really well for people migrating, even in cases where LO was insufficient.

int_19h 9y ago

You're making the same exact argument that people trying to push Linux on the desktop were making 10 years ago, and 15 years (and probably before that, it's just that's when I started dabbling in that stuff). It boils down to "it works for me, and if it doesn't work for you because of X, Y and Z, then you should just stop doing that". You can judge for yourself just how persuasive this argument really is by looking at desktop Linux market share over the past 20 years.

skrebbel 9y ago
The argument is the same, but Linux desktops did get a lot better, and with better support, since then. There's now multiple distros with great UX to choose from (as opposed to "learn xfree86 and stop whining") and indeed Wine works great with lots of programs. I say this as an avid Windows 10 user. IMHO there's still a usability gap (which is why I'm on Windows), but it's narrowing. GP's argument has a lot more merit now than it did 15 years ago.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Driver support is only part of the problem (but still a problem). The absence of self discoverability / the RTFM approach of linux will always create a ceiling in term of adoption outside of professional developers. Except when you stick a consumer GUI and specialised hardware on top (android/chromeOS). But these are not general desktops on which people can work.
- kristofferR 9y ago
  Desktop Linux suffers from the same chicken-and-egg problem that doomed Windows Phone. Developers don't develop for it since the user base isn't large enough, and people don't switch to it because app support is severely lacking. How good the raw OS is doesn't matter that much when the apps aren't up to par. Your Wine comment illustrates my point - while Wine is an awesome project - even apps running perfectly through it feel like they're running on Windows 2000. That's fine if you just care about the functionality of the app, but not if you care about the user experience.
- int_19h 9y ago

sjellis 9y ago

A lot of people who use a computer for work purposes have a number of software applications that they must be able to run reliably in order to do their job. The problem is steadily getting better in some areas, but there are still thousands of specialist applications in service today that only run on Windows. If you are lucky, there may also be Mac versions. The reality is that it's often not feasible to only run FOSS, and nothing but FOSS.

davidgerard 9y ago
Wine has been up to real-world commercial use for at least a decade, in my experience. It's more surprising these days when stuff doesn't work in Wine than when it does. (.NET support is still annoyingly imperfect.) Sponsoring getting a vertical market app working 100% in Wine is unlikely to be cheaper than cleaning up after WannaCry's competently-written successors.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  > unlikely to be cheaper I meant, of course, unlikely to be more expensive. Gah!
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
So run it at work and FOSS at home. Let the situation improve over time. I'm not talking to the everyman, I'm talking to the Hacker News reader.

cm2187 9y ago

LibreOffice is fine for basic features. But in a corporate environment you often have lots of addins to interoperate with lots of systems which won't play well with LibreOffice

jvdl 9y ago

But your argument basically boils down to: Stop using the operating system where everything works: apps, games, hardware, good office package, etc.; rather use an operating system on which debugging to a layman translates to a plane of hell itself, where your hardware may or may not work, and half your game library certainly won't. I would happily switch to Linux permanently the day the flagship office package UI doesn't resemble Office 97 (the ribbon UI is absolutely fantastic in MS Office), I can get all of my games to work, and I don't need to recompile a kernel to get something as basic as a graphics driver running.

jhasse 9y ago
> the flagship office package UI doesn't resemble Office 97 (the ribbon UI is absolutely fantastic in MS Office) It's being worked on: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/how-to-enable-libreoffice-ribbon-notebook-bar http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/how-to-enable-libreoffice... > I can get all of my games to work Many games don't port to Linux until all users have switched. It's a chicken-egg problem :( > I don't need to recompile a kernel to get something as basic as a graphics driver running. You already don't need to do that. Intel and AMD's open-source drivers are included in the kernel and nVidia's driver can be installed without recompiling the kernel.
- viraptor 9y ago
  The games are getting better. Just over half of my steam library works at the moment. Not sure when it happened but over the last 2 years I noticed more and more things being available. It's no longer just low quality indie stuff.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    If any Blizzard game would be ported, that would truly be a milestone (StarCraft 2 with WINE is a lot slower on my machine). Also many games require nVidia drivers or AMD's open source driver (e.g. Life is strange). I'm using a 144 Hz monitor and therefore need touse AMDGPU Pro (AMDGPU has a bug with >120 Hz: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93826 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93826 ). But you're right: It's getting better :) For example Rocket League and Dota 2 work great.